Browse Exhibits (2 total)
Jim Crow Mansfield
The effects of Jim Crow were evident all over Mansfield, Texas, from Farr Best Movie Theater where African Americans were only allowed access to the small balcony, to the colored school, which was for all black students up until ninth grade. The high school in Mansfield was for whites only; black students were bussed to I.M. Terrell in Fort Worth. These Jim Crow laws and customs directed the daily lives of the citizens of Mansfield. Although one Mansfield resident, Floyd Moody, remembers spending the weekends playing with some of the white Mansfield students, that all changed for him after August 1956, when he and three other students, with the help of T.M. Moody, a local black leader, and L. Clifford Davis, an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), tried to desegregate Mansfield High School.
Road to Civil Rights Act of 1964
After the incidents in the mid 1950s, Congress passed civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, and 1964. The Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 did little to advance the integration of public schools. However, the 1964 act promoted integration by denying federal funds to school that remained segregated.